Our Man in Havana

by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana

book data

1214 ratings, 3.89 average rating, 115 reviews (more data...)

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published

1999 (first published 1958) by Amereon Limited

binding

Hardcover, 220 pages

isbn

0848822846 (isbn13: 9780848822842)

description

Mr. Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of powercuts, becomes a spy to earn extra income.

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What can you tell...: Graham Greene	6	8	09/04/2007 04:44PM

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All ratings | 5 stars (279) | 4 stars (531) | 3 stars (304) | 2 stars (45) | 1 star (4) | avg 3.89

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Daniel

Daniel rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

03/03/08

Read in January, 2008

Given the supposed military intelligence that led to the war in Iraq, it's tempting to look to books such as "Our Man in Havana," Graham Greene's comic spy novel about the Cold War, for parallels to our current situation. (In the book, drawings of pieces of a household vacuum cleaner are passed off as schematics for sophisticated weaponry.) Rather than there being any direct correlation, however, it brings more to mind that quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain about how history may...more

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Margaret

Margaret rated it:

(review of isbn 140252367X)

09/24/08

bookshelves: audio-books, classics

Read in September, 2008

recommended to Margaret by: found on the library shelf
recommends it for: those who like Graham Green's books and similar

Taking place in Havana shortly before the revolution, this book exudes historical character with droll, witty British writing. The fact that this Recorded Books edition is read by narrator Simon Prebble - the MOST amazing reader of anything requiring a male voice and British accent or any variant thereof - turns the "reading" experience into a real delight.

Even though this is a classic, I admit that part of the narrative dragged to me. However, other parts were laugh aloud funny,...more

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1 comment

Alicia

Alicia rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

07/19/08

bookshelves: classics, light-reads

Admittedly, I hadn't finished the book yet at the time I wrote the below -- I was about halfway through -- but since I've seen the movie, I feel confident enough to extrapolate. Barring, of course, one of those Sense and Sensibility "Willoughby's back -- and he's DRUNK?!" surprises. Somehow I don't think ol' Graham is the type.

And it's a crying shame I'll probably never get to see the movie again. It was a particularly good one, and now that I've found the book is particularly good...more

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J rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

07/17/08

Read in January, 2006

There are a great number of authors who I can take or leave and there are a few that I can reread and reread and reread and there are a select few that I save up their novels for when I feel I need a certain something, a certain lift. Generally these authors are on the optimistic side of things or at least the wryly upbeat and generous of spirit. Think Vonnegut and Tom Robbins. An author in my same category who is less optimistic but still fills me with a warmly satisfying feeling is Graham Gree...more There are a great number of authors who I can take or leave and there are a few that I can reread and reread and reread and there are a select few that I save up their novels for when I feel I need a certain something, a certain lift. Generally these authors are on the optimistic side of things or at least the wryly upbeat and generous of spirit. Think Vonnegut and Tom Robbins. An author in my same category who is less optimistic but still fills me with a warmly satisfying feeling is Graham Greene.

There simply aren’t enough spy novels written that don’t take the spy business deadly seriously. It’s almost a niche market. Graham Greene, in Our Man in Havana, much like in The Third Man, writes a gripping novel yet with the light touch. Amusing little set pieces, somewhat addle-minded careerists, hopelessly unsuave spies, all of these gingerly poke fun at the whole conceit. He never loses sight that there is a much more bloody minded rock that all of this is based on, but he also recognizes that people don’t — can’t — live in these fictionally serious novels filled with angst and death forever and ever. Burnout would be considerably higher among the spy world if things were more like those novels, more single-minded, than like Greene’s less sinister, broader world.

This is also a humanizing touch that makes this novel richer and keener than many a better researched, more technologically precise novel. The curiously single minded relationship with geopolitical exactitude and fidelity to brands and types of eavesdropping equipment render most novels quaint and dated, the exact opposite of an author’s dreams. By focusing on the human, by the touching on the human in extraordinary circumstances, Greene wrote a timeless novel that just happens to also be a page turning thriller and slick spy novel to boot.

Our Man in Havana tells the story of James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman living in Cuba with his teenage daughter Milly, a charming girl who seeks to live above their means. Somehow, through mistaken motivations, Wormold is “drafted” by the British spy services and ends up working for his home country in order to buy her the things she wants. The novel is filled with such lovely misunderstandings and dimly grasped actions and reactions. When our man Wormold tries to hire his employee in the vacuum cleaner shop as his spy subagent, the man believes he is asking him to pimp for him, which leads into a long winding speech on the glories of Cuba and the passions of old age.

Unsuccessful as a spy or a spy recruiter, Wormold takes to inventing his agents in his reports, something his remote status allows him, the distance between London and Havana isolating him from snoopy oversight. When his superiors are impressed with the details of the plans he’s “uncovering,” they send him more agents, specifically a radio operator and a secretary named Beatrice Severn with whom Wormold falls in love. This is where the plot of misdirection really moves into high gear as Wormold desperately tries to keep all his plates spinning while the Cuban government begins to take an interest in this British “spy.”

Spooks on both sides, double crosses, pressure from a reputedly sadistic military officer for Wormold to bless an engagement to his daughter, Milly, lying to his own team, all these elements mix and jostle and slosh together. Greene handles it all with a light and deft touch and for all his feckless bad choices, you can’t help liking Wormold even as the plot unfolds then spirals way, way, way out of his control and people begin to get killed for his mistakes. After a point, as in The Third Man, Greene’s novel develops a kind of seriousness about what’s at stake, the book’s closing chapters resembling more Greene’s other famous undercover agent novel, The Quiet American.

Part of what also makes Greene’s novels so compelling is how moral they are, and I don’t simply mean moral in a sense of this is bad and this is good and that’s all there is. His morality is complex but oftentimes straightforwardly simple, and it rings throughout his work, a kind of jaded sensitivity to simple and kind people over the unduly complex. Rollo Martins in The Third Man is a simple bumbling kind of good person, and it’s clear that while Greene clearly has an admiration for Harry Lyme, his sympathies are firmly in Martins’ camp. Likewise, even the liar and double-crosser James Wormold and the jaded, bitter Thomas Fowler are Greene’s “heroes” for all their flaws.

And this humor, this sympathy with awkward, imperfect amateur sleuths and spies, makes that moment when we shift to a dangerous turn in the novels far more painful, far more serious, far more real. To come into a trashed apartment in a dark brooding book is of a piece with that selfsame the same atmosphere; to come into a trashed apartment in a book with a lighter note is to be shoved into an alien world, dangerous, your pulse quickens because it is so different. Even more so when it happens to the kind of person such things don’t happen to.

While I know Greene wrote simply scads of novels and there’s little concern to dole them out so sparingly, I also know that his interests were broad, his stories were varied, and many of his other novels are serious reflections on his Catholic faith. The really great Greene novels are the ones I salt away for that bad patch when nothing I’ve read seems very good or worthy of my concentration. Our Man in Havana, like The Third Man, like the best of Greene, is one of those doled out gems that once read move effortlessly into another category, the reread and reread and reread treasures....less

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Tripp

Tripp rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

08/03/08

Read in August, 2008

Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is a delightful farce that manages to be serious and laugh out loud funny at the same time. It follows the unfortunate Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana whose shortage of funds finds him willing to accept an offer to join the British Intelligence Service. As a generally inept and careless person, he can do any actual spying, so he ends up sending fake reports back to London so that he can use his expense fund to pay for his daughter's many exp...more

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Matthew

Matthew rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

03/23/08

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: those who follow the herd with trepidation

Graham Greene described this novel as an entertainment, seemingly distancing it from his "serious" Catholic novels. However, I find it to be a more sophisticated, nuanced approach to his earlier novels that deal with the unique qualities that separate an English Catholic from the normal Anglican class structures of which he was a witness. It explicates the issue of Catholic/Protestant cultural differences as well as the absurd logic that drives the societal institutions of all culture...more

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Matt

Matt rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

08/13/07

Read in August, 2007

I've been meaning to read a Graham Greene book for a while now, not sure why I chose this one, it might have to do with a Secret Service/CIA kick I've been on recently.

Greene refers to this book as an "Entertainment" and rightly so. I'm not sure of the technical differences between his novels and entertainments, but this is a short, fun, book. It could probably be read in a focused afternoon or two. It's about a Englishman named Wormold living in pre-Castro Havana, who becomes...more

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Georgia

Georgia rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

06/16/07

Read in June, 2007

This was absurdly funny -- it involves an expatriate vacuum salesman in Havana turned reluctant British spy. Naturally he turns in a schemata of military installations that looks suspiciously like a giant vacuum cleaner. Nonetheless, he has to sustain their belief in his intelligence, as he needs the pay to purchase the only things that will satisfy his sexy, petulant, teenaged Catholic daughter: a pony and a membership at the country club. And so he dreams up a flamenco dancer subagent, etc....more

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Geert Goeman

Geert rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

11/27/08

Read in November, 2008

'Our Man in Havana' by Graham Greene is the story of a divorced man who lives and works with his daughter in Cuba. Mister Wormold handles in vacuum-cleaners. His daughter, who's 17 years old, spent a lot of money. Wormold is always short of money and he takes an extra incom - by intervention of a Mr Hautborne - : he's going to spy in Havana fot the United Kingdom.
Tis book is a very good one; a pageturner. It's written in 1958.

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3 comments

Abhay

Abhay rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

08/12/08

Read in August, 2008

this was my first Graham Greene novel. Partly a farce (but not quite farcical enough) and partly a thriller (but lacking something in the suspense/mystery department ), I do give it points for the exotic location, the moral ambiguity and the clever dialogue- which makes for an interesting story- but the characters just weren't fleshed out enough to make them believable for me. Too often their actions/thoughts seemed contrived and took place at just the right moment to conveniently serve the pl...more

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Robert

Robert rated it:

(review of isbn 0099286084)

09/07/08

bookshelves: comedy, espionage-thriller, general-fiction

Read in September, 2008

Greene described this book as an "entertainment." In the early comedic parts I thought that Greene, at least in this instance, had indeed produced a lightweight entertaining novel and was not the heavyweight literature writer I had been lead to believe he was. I was thinking that I would not greatly inclined to read anything else by a writer many feel was robbed of the Nobel Prize.

When the book suddenly and dramatically veers towards the Tragic at about the half-way point my fe...more

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Heather

Heather rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

12/18/07

Read in June, 2007

I just read my second Graham Greene novel—well, an "entertainment" as he would have it. This one was Our Man in Havana. His writing style is quite theatrical. It reminded me of movies by David Mamet like "The Spanish Prisoner" or "The Winslow Boy". Both of them are playwrights and both are described in different places as having a naturalistic style, but they strike me as just the opposite, stiff and studied. Interesting. I actually like the movies mentioned very ...more

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April

April rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

05/29/07

Read in May, 2007

The only other Graham Greene book I'd ever read was The Quiet American, so I wasn't expecting Our Man in Havana to be funny, but it is.

British Mr. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba living with his daughter, and because business is bad and money is tight, he decides to take on the spy job offered to him by a fellow Brit. He's not really right for the job, but he feels he needs to earn his salary somehow, so he starts making up fake reports, passing drawings of a vacuum cleaner off ...more

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Jon

Jon rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

03/28/08

Read in March, 2008

What a fun book. It really read like a James-Bond-meets-Peter-Sellers spy story. With its feel of suspense, tragedy, and hint of comedic drama I would wish for a book like this if I had to be stuck in an airport.
The characters were well developed and seemed refreshingly very true to life. It was also interesting to realize how many other stories are actually based on this book's concept of a fanasty prone informant. John le Carre and George bush are just two examples of authors that ...more

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Shayla

Shayla rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

12/01/08

bookshelves: library-book-club

Read in November, 2008

As I stated in my update, this book was better than I thought it would be. It was a quick read with some amusing moments. When I was reading this I thought, has much changed in the way of espionage? Hopefully the aren't recruiting vacuum cleaner salesmen, but I'm pretty sure agents are still fabricating information and with what consequences? I also wished that Greene had given me better sense of Cuba...there has to be more than seedy and dark bars and strip joints.

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James

James rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

06/07/08

Read in June, 2008

I'd never read this before and thought it was great. The book wasn't as heavy, in my opinion, as some of Greene's others. I constantly compared the book to The Quiet American. I guess because the absurdity of the cold war is a theme in both books. While the Quiet American dealt with relationships and convictions as much as the cold war, this book deals almost exclusively with the corruption of both sides in the cold war and how people in the middle took advantage of that corruption and were...more

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Deborah

Deborah rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

02/17/08

Read in July, 2006

First published in 1958, this book has so many fantastic things going for it. An English vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana finds himself mixed up in a deadly charade after reluctantly agreeing to act as a spy for the British government. In want of the money, but not the grief, he decides to fabricate his reports. When the government takes his intelligence seriously, the regrets pile up rather quickly.

Thrilling plot, captivating characters, perpetually relevant conflicts related to family,...more

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Ty rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

12/01/08

A pretty good premise (a British ex-pat starts fabricating a conspiracy by submitting sketches of his vacuum parts as missile segments), comedy is not Greene's strength.

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Joe

Joe rated it:

09/06/07

bookshelves: espionage

Read in September, 2007

For those of you who have dipped [or would like to dip:] into the world of cold war espionage fiction, i don't think you can find a better voice than greene's. greene encompasses all sides of cold war sentiment; absurdity, helplessness, hilarity, frustration, struggle, victory, loss, etc. his prose is gorgeous and strong, surprising and evocative. this is a landmark book for good reason. i wanted to adapt it into a play immediately after finishing it. and then i saw that, get this, the firs...more

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Michael

Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0140184937)

06/09/08

bookshelves: currently-reading

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: lovers of satire

I usually don't read books about espionage. Our Man In Havana is more of a character study than a thriller. As comedy and political satire it rings true. Though set in the 1950's, this book is quite relevant today. I could well imagine the CIA resembling the bungling British M16 portrayed in this book. Given that the CIA was certain of the existence of WMD's in Iraq, it not far-fetched that a spy would describe military weapons systems based on vacuum-cleaner designs. This book truly is the Gra...more

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